Telecommunication lines today commonly employ a large number of wires bundled together into a cylindrically configured cable with each wire having an electrical conductor sheathed with insulation. In connecting an end of the cable to ancillary electrical terminals, couplings and the like an end portion of each wire must be stripped of its insulation. Often these end portions must also be severed to provide uniform length to the exposed conductors. This can, of course, be accomplished manually but such it highly inefficient where the cable is composed of a large number of wires.
For this reason various devices have heretofore been developed to facilitate this task. One group of devices serves to reorient an end of the cable bundle mechanically into a linear array of wires to facilitate work to be performed on the cable wire ends. One of these devices is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,881,246 as having a template formed with a set of spaced grooves that merge with an enlarged groove or channel at one end. A bar is provided for movement between raised and lowered positions above the template as well as for movement over the surface of the template. With this device the free ends of cable wires may be placed upon the template in the enlarged groove and the bar lowered thereon causing the bundle of wires to fan out in that groove and over the surface of the template. The bar is then moved over the surface template forcing the wires into position within the various grooves that branch from the enlarged, common groove. After the free ends have been fanned into the grooves various work operations may then be performed on that portion of the ends which project beyond the template such as trimming, stripping, applying terminals or color identification. Another device in this general class is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,107,838 wherein an anvil is moved into pressure engagement with a bundle of wires and then moved axially in pressure contact over the wires a number of times in "ironing" the bundle into a planar array.
Another group of devices which facilitate the above described task serves the strip insulation from a group of wires which have been preoriented in a linear array. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,706,241, for example, apparatus is described for severing and stripping the ends of conductors of a ribbon cable whose member wires are manufactued in a planar array. Here the conductors are extended through and gripped by intermeshing teeth of a pair of multi-tooth jaws. Those portions of the conductors which extend beyond the jaws is severed and the insulation nicked by an insulation cutting blade at a point intermediate the jaws and the cutting blade. The wires are then pulled from between the pair of jaws thereby stripping their insulation while maintaining the stripped conductors in the planar array. U.S. Pat. No. 3,988,815 illustrates another example of this group of devices wherein again jaws having intermeshing teeth are employed into which various wires are guided after having been manually oriented. Means are provided for moving one set of jaws with respect to the other onto the wires and then moving the jaws together axially the wires in performing a stripping operation.
The just described two groups of devices are thus seen to reorient a bundle of wires into a linear array or to strip insulation from a group of wires which have already been oriented in a spaced array within multi-tooth jaws. It would, of course, be desirable to provide an apparatus and method for orienting stripping and serving an end portion of a bundle of wires with a single apparatus in one combined operation free of direct manual manipulation of the wires. The presence of the intermeshing teeth which the jaws of prior art apparatus have had has, however, impeded this development. It is with this problem that the present invention is primarily concerned.